by Carol Berg
“We do not understand human gods at all, though every human tries vigorously to explain them. The long-lived, as all things—sea and sky, humans and beasts—are both subject to the Everlasting and a part of it. The Law of the Everlasting has charged our kind to tend the land and sea. Thus in our work we seek beauty, balance, vigor and harmony to match that we see in the Everlasting. But even among the long-lived lie disagreements as to the exact nature of the perfection toward which we strive…
“No! As vayar I pledged to answer thy questions as far as I am able. But I cannot and will not discuss the Canon with a halfbreed stripling, though you were to stand twice my size or manifest talents to make your present ones seem small. Thy tasks are other and will never be concerned with the dance.”
And this last answer drove me to distraction. “You’ve told me the world is dying,” I said, as we trotted down the mountainside, “and I believe you. I’ve seen it. My prince, Eodward’s son, a man who studies and reveres the Danae, has brought your archon news of those you call the Scourge—the Harrowers. We fear the Harrowers have some larger plan that threatens your kind. Ignorant as we are, we cannot guess what that might be or what must be done about it. That is what he hoped to learn from the archon…the reason he gave me up to them.” I told myself that knowledge was Osriel’s aim, not solely the power to aid in his unholy mystery, as Elene feared.
Kol listened carefully, gravely, his body poised in interest. But his response, when it came, remained unchanged. “Humans can do nothing. Nor can halfbreeds. I will not discuss this matter with thee.” Which declaration, along with his troubled expression, told me that all of this most certainly had to do with the Canon, and that no matter my wheedling or pleading, he would not budge. All I could do was stay close and hope to change his mind. Perhaps Saverian would have more luck with the monk.
“Attend, stripling!” As we descended into the forest that wrapped the lower slopes of Aesol Mount, Kol broke his broody silence. “If thy walking gards are to be of use, thou must learn. Unless…Perhaps thy human half flags?”
His scorn grated, especially as it reminded me how long it had been since my restless night on the sand and Saverian’s lusciously fat and gritty eggs. “I’m here to learn,” I said.
He acknowledged my declaration with a jerk of his head. “Recall the crowned fir I showed thee. Dost thou see something like here in the daylight? Yes…there. Now consider the one that stood on the ascent from the meadow—the same in its shape against the sky, in its smell and taste, in its presence in the wood, though its location differed greatly…”
As dreams of food and sleep crept into my bones with the allure of nivat, Kol forced me to dredge up every recollection of the path we had been walking when I had asked about his mode of traveling—the slope of the land to either side as well as what had lain under our feet, the configuration of the stars, which I could not remember, and the taste of the air, which, to his surprise, I could. And then he bade me close my eyes and consider the new marks I wore, explaining that it was easier to begin this teaching while I yet could feel the burning of their newness.
“I’ve no expectation that thou’lt accomplish a shift so soon. Subtle moves give always the most difficulty to a stripling. The touch needed is not a grand jequé, but only a small leap from one manner of thinking to another. Haste leads to error. Thou must remember to—”
“Just so. I understand.” Impatient with his tedious schooling, I glared at the treetop. I was accustomed to wielding magic, and the memory and instinct he described as bound into my new markings were but another form of it. My mind held to the recollections and reached into the faint blue aura that I envisioned near my heart, grasping the power I found there…
…and I was tumbling head over heels down a steep gully, snagging limbs and hair on rocks, wild raspberry thorns, and rotting timber. My sublimely graceful vayar, gards gleaming silver in the morning sunlight, stood on the path at the verge of the gully, one arm wrapped about a stately fir, laughing at me. It was worth the uncomfortable exercise to see him laugh. If his grieving made the mountains weep, Kol’s merriment made the sunlight shimmer.
“Another lesson, my cocky stripling,” he said, once on the near side of sober again. “One must remember to decide a position for one’s feet, else one may topple from a mountaintop, step into a lake or tar pit, or slide…most wretchedly…into a ravine.”
I struggled helplessly in my nest of raspberry thicket and rotted hawthorn, laughing, too, despite my humiliating display, the painful scrapes and bruises atop my already tender skin, and the long, steep climb awaiting me. Even beings of legend could not always get things right.
When at last I climbed onto the path, I stretched out my blood-scoured arms. “Tell me, vayar…”
“The gards survive all but the most violent wounding,” he said, all seriousness again. “On our way, we shall practice closure. Clearly thou didst not find true closure at Stathero, if thine ears yet reported sound. Stone hath no voice.”
“Nay, vayar, I heard them, even Stathero…”
Kol refused to believe my claim to have heard the speech of stones. Evidently the exercise was supposed to result in the silence I ultimately found. He set me other problems as we walked: to describe the scent of thistledown from one particular withered plant along the path, to isolate the feel of salt spray on the wind, carried from the northern sea. Some I managed, some I did not. But I felt more in control of my senses, and came to believe I could learn to pick and choose what I saw and heard.
“Control and discrimination must become as natural as breathing,” said Kol. “With practice, it will.”
He jumped from a steep hillside, where he’d had me examining the movement of the soil sifting ever so slowly downward, and landed softly on the path far below.
I flattened myself to the scrubby ground and crept downward, my tired feet skidding—speeding the hillside’s centuries-long collapse.
When I joined my uncle on the path, pleased I had not slipped and broken my neck, he huffed scornfully. “Thou hast the capacity to jump as I do, if thou’lt but try. Drive thy spirit upward with the leap and hold it firm and soaring until thy feet touch solidly. It is will that counters the forces that draw us to earth.” Without waiting for me to so much as catch my breath, he marched down the path. “Next task: Tell me which elements key our shifts on the way down. Be attentive.”
After some half quellé of rocks and roots enough to make a goat stumble, Kol halted and asked me how many changes we had made since he had jumped from the hillside. The shifting exercise and the downward climb had sapped nearly the last of my endurance, and the wintry air had begun to penetrate the shield of warmth I had enjoyed since leaving Picus’s house. Unable to summon words enough to describe or even count what I’d seen, I sat on my haunches, cleared away the leaves and debris from a square of earth, and sketched out a map in the soft dirt.
The exercise helped refresh my mind. I pointed to an angled square that signified a rock. “You shifted here, where that squarish boulder hung out over the path. Again here…I think…where the pond was choked with dead leaves. And here”—I pointed to a split in the path—“or just beyond…I’m not sure. Here, perhaps?”
Kol looked from my face to the sketch and back again. “Dost thou mock me?” he said stiffly. “Thinkest thou my object is to shame thee, that thou must attempt the same?”
I blinked, entirely confused. “No…I’m sorry…what is it? You asked how many shifts. My head is too tired to think. I drew the map so I could show you.”
“Thou canst untangle such markings?” he said. “Like Janus’s papers? Picus’s books?”
“Read? Not words, no. I’ve never—” As the underlying sense of his question struck me, I understood his surprise…and his offense. I was both and neither, Osriel had said. “I cannot read words…books…the writing on pages as humans can. They appear naught but blotches and a jumble. However, the lines and patterns of a map, the pictures and symbols, those m
ake sense to me. But you…and the others of your kind…can’t sort out those, either?”
“We see what lives. What moves. We understand bulk and shape and eating and purpose. Scratchings on beast skins or wood chips or dirt have no meaning to us.”
“And yet, your eyes can interpret these.” I held out my arm where pale fronds of sea grass twined my fingers.
His eyebrows rose. “Thy gards live—a part of thee, as mine are a part of me.”
I bowed to him in sincere apology. “Forgive me, vayar. I did not understand. Another lesson learned.”
He jerked his head and walked ahead. “Attend, rejongai…”
Feeling as lively and attentive as a post, I stayed close enough to follow Kol’s shifting paths the rest of the way, but was incapable of analyzing his moves or the terrain. When the woodland and Picus’s little garden vale came into view at last, I had fallen considerably behind.
Kol halted a little upstream from the monk’s tidy plots, and by the time I joined him, he had plunged his hand into a reed-shadowed backwater and pulled out a plump silver fish. As he stilled its flopping distress with a rock, I knelt beside the pool and plunged my head into the water. Though chilled already, I hoped the icy bath might set my sluggish thoughts moving again. I had so many questions I needed to ask, so many lessons to learn. I could not allow him to think me weak or foolish.
But when I sat up again, all I could think was how fine the sun felt on my back, and how soft the earth under my knees, and I could not help but sag into a formless heap on the stream bank, mumbling something to Kol about taking just one moment to consider all I’d learned.
Rosemary and basil. Fish. My stomach near caved in upon itself at the fragrant wood smoke. I blinked and stirred, grimacing at the twigs and pebbles embedded in my ribs. One numb hand prickled painfully as I raised my head. An odd coating of ash dirtied that hand, and I tried for a goodly while to brush it away before remembering that the livid marks were a part of me. I sat up quickly.
Thin blue smoke rose from a patch of sandy stream bank a few paces from my feet and dispersed slowly above a sea of yellow grass and the green islands of Picus’s garden plots. A bundle wrapped in blackened leaves sizzled in the little fire—the source of the savory smells. Though steep-angled sunlight sculpted the nearby slopes, deepening the colors of the meadow to ocher and emerald and highlighting the splash of dark trees to either side, iron-gray clouds obscured Aesol Mount and all else to the east and south of us. I stretched and shivered, then stepped closer to the little fire and sat on my haunches.
Kol danced in the yellow grass, or rather practiced, I guessed, as he repeated a particular spinning leap for the fifth time. I felt no stirring in the earth or magic in the still, cold autumn afternoon. He stopped, stretched out first one leg behind him and then the other, bent himself in an impossible arc to one side and then another while clasping his hands at his back. Then he began again. Arms set in a graceful upward curve, now step, leap into the air higher than my head, spin with legs straight together, land like a settling leaf. Shake out the tight legs. Step back. Pause. Arms up, step, leap, spin. Step back…Whatever difference might exist between one exemplar and the next was far too subtle for my judgment. How could a man force his body into such feats?
I rose onto my toes, then bent my knees and jumped as high as I could, doing my best to turn but halfway round as I did so. My leap might have cleared the height of a small dog, and my feet struck earth so hard I rattled my teeth and came near falling in the fire. How could one even begin without music?
I squatted and touched the earth, not seeking, so much as wondering…and laughing a little…at what strange byways my thoughts traveled nowadays. Not so long ago my mentor was tidy Brother Sebastian, and my worst trouble the good brother’s scolding me for a dirty cowl or discovering my inability to read. Danae did not read. Danae danced, healed, and moved, soundless and graceful, through the world like the bird that glided in circles high above the meadow.
“Hast thou failed in attentiveness and burnt my fish, rejongai?” Somehow Kol had come up behind me without my knowing.
I jumped up, my face blooming hotter than the coals. “I didn’t know you intended me to—”
But the arch of his eyebrow and a particular compression of his lips gave me to believe, of a sudden, that I had no need to defend myself against his charge. And in the moment I comprehended that, I understood a number of other things.
“You have bested me, uncle, I’ll confess it. All my claims of strength and endurance and learning crumbled at your assault. I suppose I’m fortunate that I didn’t step off a cliff. I could neither have walked one more step nor imbibed one more lesson, which, I’m coming to think, is one of those very lessons you wish me to learn. And if you truly relied on me to heed your cooking, you’re neither so wise a vayar as I’m coming to suspect nor so vigilant a guardian.”
“To recognize a body’s limits is surer protection than gards or human magic. I have pledged to ensure thy safety. The lesson had to be taught.” He retrieved a stick and arranged the coals piled about his wrapped fish. “In truth thou didst surpass every boundary I foresaw. And I am not sure what to do about that.”
My hopes, despite the tempering of truth, surged anew. His manner invited me to broach the most important topics again. “Relagai…”
The sunlight vanished. I shivered and searched for words sufficient to express my need. Snowflakes drifted from the overripe clouds. A red-tailed hawk circled lazily above the meadow. Kol turned his fish with a stick, frowned, and glanced upward. He sat up sharply.
“Valen,” he said, eyes fixed on the bird. “Canst thou find Picus’s house, by gard or eye or thy human magic?”
Of a sudden, the air thrummed with danger. My gaze swept the forest edge and the ash tree where he’d sat when I joined him in the night, then shot up to the bird, which had completed a loop and now arrowed toward Kol. I had walked here from the hut without any magic. “I believe so. What’s wrong?”
“Kneel and bow thy head so the bird cannot note thy unmarked skin. Do it now.” His command brooked no question. “When I leave the meadow, be off to Picus and await my return. Or Stian’s. Do not walk the world unguarded.”
I did as he said, extending my legs and bending over them in one of his stretching postures. The only reason to hide my unmarked face and groin would be to pass me off as a mature Dané. Which meant that someone—the bird’s master?—must be watching. “Who’s coming?”
“Hush.” He tossed his stick into the fire and rose. Wings ruffled. “In the Canon, bird, and honor to thy master and mistress.” I felt no presence save Kol and the bird. “Fortunately I’ve completed both work and practice this day, thus can answer their summons promptly.”
No one responded. My uncle’s chilly declarations seemed directed solely to the bird.
“I prefer to travel uncompanioned, as you know, but of course, I cannot prevent thee. Wait…”
Kol’s hand rested lightly on my back for a moment. “It seems Tuari and Nysse require my presence, Jinte. Keep thy spine stretched and loose until the finger numbness subsides. ’Tis the surest method for relief.”
I waved a hand and shifted my position slightly as if heeding his advice…as if the bird might remember my false name or how I had responded to the prompting. The evening’s chill settled deeper.
The wings ruffled again and flapped, and after a moment, a sidewise glance showed Kol striding down the meadow and the hawk gliding in lazy circles above him. Once they had vanished into the evening, I jumped up and raced into the wood in search of Picus and Saverian. Kol’s abandoned fish had charred to ash.
Chapter 17
“The messenger bird is like to be a friend of the archon, one who failed to make the fourth passage.” By the light of the twig lantern, Picus picked bits of leaf and thorn from a sheep’s skin. “ ’Tis the common fate of those who cannot dance their Danae magic well enough or learn the skills required of them.”
“T
hey’re forced to become birds if they fail to make the fourth passage?” Saverian paused in her frenetic pacing to gape at Picus as if he’d said Magrog himself would sit down with us to dine.
Saverian’s relentless urgency had me gobbling much too fast. The woman had come near taking off my head with an oak limb when I refused to leave straightaway to take her home to Renna. The woman and the monk were bundled in cloaks and blankets, while I sat comfortably on the snow-dusted ground in shirt and braies, sopping up Picus’s boiled turnips with a wad of doughy bread. Though I mourned Kol’s fish, I would have relished far worse than the monk’s meager fare by this time. Evidently two full days had passed since I’d gone off with Kol.
“None are forced into bird form,” said Picus, scratching his arms thoughtfully before returning to his wool picking, “unless they’ve sore trespassed their Law, in which case their new form would more like be stone or snake. The alter choice for failure is to live on as a hunter, artisan, weaver, or some such like, and such is not a happy life for a Dané. While their fellows dance, their own bare faces wrinkle and their bodies fail near quick as us human folk. Without a sianou they will ever feel rootless and lost. Most prefer inhabiting bird or beast to such shame, though I’ve always been of a mind ’tis a perversion of the ordo mundi as if ’twere I had walked into Navronne as king instead of my good prince. But at the least, they choose it for themselves.”
My hand paused twixt bowl and mouth, soup dripping from the bread onto my knees. “The hawk was a person, then, thinking and listening…” Which explained Kol’s little deception. A person…trapped in that feathered body. And in Moth’s owl, too. I had already decided that Moth, not Kol, had led me into murder in the bogs. I shuddered.
“Nay. No person. ’Tis said they lose most faculties, retaining only what wit their companions especially nurture.” Which made sense if the person had no soul to begin with.